Simeon Tegel

Peru’s staggeringly incompetent far-left coup

Pedro Castillo (photo: Getty)

Lima, Peru

For the last 17 months, Peruvians have been wondering what it would take to see the back of Pedro Castillo, their staggeringly incompetent and deeply unpopular far left president.

On Wednesday, they got their answer — when Castillo made a botched attempt to metamorphise from an elected head-of-state into an even more inept version of that trope of Latin American history, the caudillo or authoritarian strongman.

Cornered by anticorruption prosecutors and facing an impeachment vote that evening, the 53-year-old former rural schoolteacher and wildcat strike leader decided to take the bull by the horns.

In an unannounced televised address to the nation shortly before noon, Castillo, his hands visibly shaking, declared that he was dissolving congress, restructuring the judiciary, imposing a national curfew and, for good measure, would be ruling by decree.

Normally, wannabe dictators confirm with the generals and admirals that they have the support of the armed forces before taking such a drastic and flagrantly unconstitutional step. Failing that, they might want to ensure that they have widespread public backing.

But not Castillo.

For reasons that have yet to become clear, but which almost certainly blend large doses of both desperation and a detachment from reality — from a president whose antipathy towards the free press led him to famously never read the newspapers — Castillo committed a miscalculation as glaring in its own way as Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid for Twitter.

The response to the authoritarian power grab was immediate and overwhelming. Condemnation rained down from everyone from the US Embassy and Castillo’s own lawyer to Peru’s Joint Command of the Armed Forces.

Lawmakers immediately brought forward the impeachment vote, which until that point had not been certain to achieve the necessary two thirds supermajority to oust the president. Less than two hours after his TV address, Castillo had been voted out of office with immediate effect by 101 votes to six.

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